Program Announced for IASC Workshop on Social Mobilization and the Commons

In the background: Demonstration in the Yaqui valley against a water transfer.Photo and copyright by Sergio Villamayor-Tomas, published by permission.

An opening event in the evening of June 20, 2018 kicks off the IASC workshop in Barcelona "Social Mobilization and the Commons: A Virtuous Cycle?" The event, organized in an informal round table format, discusses the practice and policy around commons movements featuring guest speakers Concha Salguero of Iniciativa Comunales, Massimo de Angelis of University of East London, and Nikola Zeuner of Wikimedia Germany. Here you can see the poster of the opening event.

With the aim to create a much-needed space for knowledge sharing among scholars or non-academics interested in the intersection of social movements and commons, workshop with plenary and thematic sessions starts on June 21. Discussions in this workshop cover a variety of empirical settings, methods and epistemological approaches. The two-day intense program of the workshop offers several thematically organized sessions all contextualizing many forms of intersection between social mobilization and the commons. These overarching themes are grouped into Digital & Knowledge Commons, Water & Food, Land & Water, Forests, Solidarity, The Urban Commons, and Advocacy. The lineup of speakers is exciting and, in good tradition of IASC, very diverse too - both some of the long-standing members of the IASC, as well as some new friends, who will be joining the IASC series of workshops for the first time, will present their latest thoughts on a wide variety of nuances under the above themes. See the detailed program of the workshop, including the abstracts from individual paper presentations here.

The IASC President, John Powell, will greet the participants in the closing plenary and share the latest updates about developments and opportunities in the IASC and plans for the near future. In an innovative format to IASC Workshops, Mayo Fuster Morell (Universitat Overt Catalunya), Fabio de Castro (CEDLA, University of Amsterdam), Hara Kouki (University of Durham), and Prateep Nayak (University of Waterloo) will serve as Rapporteurs synthesizing the key outcomes from individual sessions in their presentation back to the plenary.

We remind that the IASC Workshop "Social Mobilization and the Commons: A Virtuous Cycle?" is organized by Sergio Villamayor-Tomás, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA), Autonomous University of Barcelona, Gustavo García-López, Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Planning, University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras, and Giacomo D’Alisa, a FCT Portugal post-doc, a political ecologist at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, with support from Raphael Cantillana, a social and cultural anthropology student at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Fenja Jacobs, a geography student at the University of Augsburg and Barcelona-based intern for "Research & Degrowth".

Program Announced for IASC Workshop on Social Mobilization and the Commons